José Mourinho has turned on his Benfica players after the team’s 3-1 defeat by Braga in the Portuguese League Cup semi-finals, suggesting that the squad would be staying at the club’s Seixal training base until further notice.
“The players will sleep in Seixal, and on Thursday there is training, and the day after there will be training,” Mourinho said at his post-match press conference. “When we arrive in Seixal, everyone will go to their rooms.”
He added: “I hope the players sleep as well as I do, which is to say that they don’t sleep at all. That’s what I wish for them. That they don’t sleep and instead think a lot, like I’m going to.”
The Benfica president, Rui Costa, said after the defeat that the squad had already planned to stay at Seixal after the game in Leiria, a city 90 miles north of Lisbon. “It’s not a punishment, it’s a precaution for the next games,” he told Portuguese media. “It was already planned that the players would spend the night in Seixal.”
The final of the League Cup will be played on Saturday in Leiria but, with Benfica not taking part, Mourinho said the squad would start preparing for their Portuguese Cup quarter-final against Porto next week. There was no indication as to whether his players would leave Seixal before Wednesday’s match at the Estádio do Dragão.
“Since there’s no final on Saturday, our next game is against Porto next Wednesday,” said Mourinho, who signed a two-year deal with Benfica in September. “Tomorrow, we’ll start talking and preparing for Porto.”
Benfica went into Wednesday’s game as favourites to win the tournament, after their local rivals Sporting lost to Vitória Guimarães in Tuesday’s first semi-final. Braga took a two-goal lead into the break, with Pau Víctor and Rodrigo Zalazar on target in Leiria.
Vangelis Pavlidis’s penalty pulled one back, but Gustaf Lagerbielke secured victory for Braga before the Benfica defender Nicólas Otamendi was sent off in stoppage time. The defeat is another setback in a season where Benfica sit 10 points behind Porto, the leaders, in the league, and have two wins from six Champions League matches.
“The first half was awful, inexplicable,” Mourinho said. “I can’t find anything positive in the first half outside the first five minutes. The second half belonged to us, so would a draw have been a fair result? No. Anyone who plays as badly as we did in the first half deserves to lose.”
The 62-year-old added: “It would have been much easier to come here and congratulate Braga, but I can’t say that,. It wasn’t Braga that won, it was us who lost.”
Mourinho also suggested his players did not respond to his team talk after the game, and questioned their overall mentality. “There was so much sadness, it ended up being a monologue,” he said. “But I don’t want to believe a Benfica player is nervous about a League Cup semi-final, because then he’s not a player for Benfica.”
